Inter-Is

Last night I had a series of complex dreams in the style of Barbara Kingsolver's Poisonwood Bible.

There was a family that lived in the hollow of a mountain. Water flowed through the hollow but pooled in front of their home. The home was simple at times, otherwise decrepit. It smelt like dust and burnt wood. There were four children. An angry oldest child (13) who was sometimes a 'bully' and sometimes a 'trouble-maker', two younger boys (10 and 8) and a girl (6). There was a thin mother in a worn cotton dress that came down to her mid-calf. And then there was the father, an abusive man who I mostly only saw from afar. He was normally working or drinking.

In this dream, my conscious took turns inhabiting different bodies. In most dreams I observe scenes like a puppeteer. Hovering. Meddling. In this dream, I literally saw through the eyes of the different people I embodied. For example, when I was the six year old girl, I was walking behind my mom on a hill and noticed the bruises on her legs as the dress lifted with each step. My imagination met my eye level. I remember thinking how pretty the shapes of the bruises were, but how I didn't like something about them. Maybe the color. My imagination met my age level.

Most of the dream were scenes with overly simplistic plot, but deep emotion. I remember being the "thirteen year old bully", and sitting on the porch with the dad while it was raining. I remember these mixed emotions of fear and joy. I was anxious to be that close to the man, but exuberantly happy that he allowed me that close. In that mix of emotions, I became overly anxious about the rain flooding the house, the splash back from the porch dampening my clothes, and the noises of my siblings inside and how each overheard word made my father shift in his seat. I wanted to run in and 'pound some sense' into my siblings. I remember so much detail. The smell of the rain. The fog over the water. The sound of the man's weight on the chair as he rocked back and forth on the rotting floor boards. How his uneven whiskers moved as he smoked his pipe.

In a more dramatic scene, I remember being the ten year old boy and hearing my six year old sister scream, so I ran to the water and saw that my older brother was motionless at the bottom, caught in some seaweed or trash or something. So I dove in to try and pull him up, but I was too scared, and began frantically swimming towards the top. I saw my mom running towards the water, and I felt shame at not having my brother with me. She came splashing into the water, and became hysterical. I was afraid she would drown, and so I tried to pull her to shore, but I was so small compared to her, and she was treading water, holding me tightly. Later I dreamt the same scene, except I was the mother, horrified that I had lost my son. I swam out and saw that there was a rope around his neck, and realized that my husband had done this. I transitioned from this fear that I had lost my son, to this even deeper fear that immobilized me, and I clung to my ten-year-old. The dream was so strange, because when I was the ten year old, I saw something around my brothers neck, but assumed it was accidental. Any guilt or blame was on me. When I was the mother, I put things together differently.

What really struck me about this dream was that, every now and then, I was myself as a social worker, 'assessing' the family. After being several of the children, and after being the mother, suddenly I was coming to realizations like, "Mother is borderline MR...". Also, when I was the children, I felt scared, hungry, angry, cold, anxious, but never embarrassed. But suddenly when a child welfare worker was there, I remember being conscious that I was covered in dirt or poorly dressed. I remember feeling stupid, and worse, that my mom was stupid. And sometimes, depending on the child, I began to hate my mom.

I was the social worker, but not any more than I was the mom or the six year old. And yet, as the social worker, after having 'lived' as the mother and her children, I thought about how best to break up the sibling group in foster care placement. I was the social worker, not any more than I was the mom or the six year old, but as the social worker I detached and used the power inherent in my role, but without understanding those involved as I obviously had the ability to do. I was the social worker, not any more than I was the mom, but I didn't share my power. I had my own idea of what was best for the family, forgetting that I was the mom.

Passover

Passover

Then you shall take some of the blood, and put it on the door posts and the lintels of the houses . . .

and when I see the blood, I shall pass over you, and no plague shall fall upon you to destroy you, when I smite the land of Egypt.
-Exodus 12: 7 & 13

They thought they were safe
that spring night; when they daubed
the doorways with sacrificial blood.
To be sure, the angel of death
passed them over, but for what?

Forty years in the desert
without a home, without a bed,
following new laws to an unknown land.
Easier to have died in Egypt
or stayed there a slave, pretending
there was safety in the old familiar.

But the promise, from those first
naked days outside the garden,
is that there is no safety,
only the terrible blessing
of the journey. You were born
through a doorway marked in blood.
We are, all of us, passed over,
brushed in the night by terrible wings.

Ask that fierce presence,
whose imagination you hold.
God did not promise that we shall live,
but that we might, at last, glimpse the stars,
brilliant in the desert sky.

~ Lynn Ungar ~

Simple Gifts

Simple Gifts:

Yo Yo Ma and Alison Krauss

Beautiful

Wabi-Sabi Sequel

Nothing is perfect. Nothing lasts. Nothing is finished.

I don't really know Wabi-Sabi, but I would include human relationship.

I see impermanence as suffering because of my attachments.

My relationships.

But with the living world, it isn't just suffering. It's reason to engage.

As machines become more and more efficient and perfect, so it will become clear that imperfection is the greatness of humanity.

For all of you imperfections I love too much, so much, very much right now:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zQn3iO5xhQ&NR=1

Wabi-Sabi

As I emerge from the heavy rock that is grad school, (12-hour days, eating on the run, reading report after report of child abuse, constantly being graded, and pants that just aren't jeans), I feel exhausted and a little beat up. Something within me is tired and thirsty. And so I find myself reclaiming the spiritual; seeking a calm, reflective, unhurried space in my day.

It seems most faith traditions encourage some form of discipline. Most of the time I think discipline is healthy. Right now I think we try too hard. Right now I would rather embrace what comes naturally. My husband spends an hour in prayer every morning. I feel guilty for not maintaining the same practice. Normally he finds me still in bed when he's done. But that's ok. Because I get more out of lying in bed, watching the daylight pour in through our curtains, long strips of yellow and red that we first used as the table cloth at our wedding. I don't read the Bible religiously, either. But that's ok. Because I get more out of sitting on my front porch watching the vultures clamber around in the tall trees outside. The sound of the branches snapping under their clumsy weight reaches something deep inside me. I have a spirituality that comes so naturally to me. It is simple, and completely un-disciplined. It is nothing more than myself. And anything but myself. It's beauty and wonder and peace in everything, and I am connected to it in the noticing.

It is my experience that out of chaos comes order. Out of a million random events in my life come the words "wabi-sabi". I had been contemplating on my spirituality, and happened upon words for it in this month's issue of Mother Earth News. According to the author, Griggs Lawrence, Wabi-Sabi is "a subtly spiritual philosophy that sees home as sanctuary". Juniper (2003) (I can't believe I just cited like that in a blog) says "If an object or expression can bring about, within us, a sense of serene melancholy and a spiritual longing, then that object could be said to be wabi-sabi". Griggs Lawrence continues, "everything in a home, from the breakfast table to the attic windows, presents an opportunity to see beauty, because beauty is ordinary".

Hello new understanding of my soul. I like these bursts of daylight, though I know they are as impermanent as my home or myself.

I don't keep a Wabi-Sabi home, if one can keep a home Wabi-Sabi as they keep it Kosher. My home is anything but a sanctuary to me right now. It's a mess, frankly. But inside and outside my home I encounter things that draw from me that spiritual longing Juniper mentioned. And as I transition from grad school to civilian life, or any life, I look forward to connecting with the ordinary parts of my day, taking refuge in ordinary routines like cooking and cleaning, clearing out the unnecessary, and exploring these standards of Wabi-Sabi:

HISTORY

I try to fill my home with meaning and personal history. Keith's great uncle's war chest. His grandmother's drawers. Plates, bowls, and mugs that each carry their own memory.

IMPERMANENCE

The shadow, the daylight, and consequently the day. The plant. The wall. Me, the observer. Suddenly we are all equally impermanent. And equally beautiful.

INCOMPLETENESS

I do this too often - I take pictures of the most random things. Like this dough. I was rolling out fauschnaught, and struck by the beauty. I am sure it is very un-wabi-sabi of me to try and capture the moment and make it permanent. But I like that I recognize it's beauty.

VISION

Vision is about texture and color. I love our hand-carved bed Keith designed. I love our hand-woven orange blanket from Guatemala. I love the sunlight coming through those orange window shades / wedding table cloths I mentioned earlier.

CRAFT

I am sure a lot of these examples do not count as "Wabi-Sabi". Craft is about things made by hand, moving away from factory products. This is more like reclaiming those products and personalizing them. All but two of these were trash items that I was drawn to

(and then drew on...)

SPACE

Space is about simplicity. Letting open areas be their own decoration. It's part of making the home a sanctuary. The rest of our lives are busy, and our home should be an escape. My house, however, is covered in color and clutter! But one aspect of "space" that I do notice and enjoy in my home is light, and how it creates its own beauty in a space.

SABI (or the beauty that comes with age) AND SOUL

Keith and I refer to these things as having "personality". Like Keith's grandfather's 'barn tool drawer', now our tea drawer! It wears the scars of it's history so beautifully! From the cup ring to the heart-shaped newspaper that has managed to stick through the decades. I do think that the intensity of life gets stuck on objects. They live with us and outlive us.

HOSPITALITY

Many of our friends live in the city,

so something Keith and I have tried to offer is an outside space of hospitality.

Travel Bug

In honor of my restless heart: a flashback from our time in Thailand

Sawatdi kha phuan gap khrop-khrua (Greetings friends and family!)

As you can tell by this impressive introduction, language is coming along, though slowly. Thai is fascinating to learn. After trying to learn Spanish, I appreciate that there are no verb tenses! And the sentence structure is simple comparatively- in fact it sounds a bit like cookie monster when you directly translate. "I hungry. We go cafeteria?" What makes the language difficult is the tones. ( ^ ) falling tone, ( / ) high tone, etc. One word can have seven very different meanings mostly dependent on tone! For example, the word MAA = come, dog, horse, brew, ghost. Rot MAA = carriage. MAA Nang = bench. Kaa MAA = Pectoral fin. But I have a good method- I just always assume that when I hear "maa" people are talking about pectoral fins. It serves me well."măi mai mái mâi" translates as "Does new wood burn well?" Glay is the word for both near and far. Figure that one out. And to make it all a little more exciting, several common every-day words (like "noodle") are spelled the same, pronounced the same- yet if you only raise or lower the tone they turn to vulgar or offensive words. Luckily all the Thai people we have met show an abundance of grace and a fantastic ability to read the context clues. So when Keith orders "penis" soup, they laugh a bit but know he means "noodles' (both "kwai"). Luckily I have less grace, and so you all get to hear that story!

The other night I met Keith's host family from three years ago when he was a student in Thailand. I was very nervous! Maybe because Keith's real family is so fabulous that any nervousness I had from meeting them ended in an anticlimax. This visit was the first experience I had with a Thai person's interpretation of "just a little spicy". As Keith held a conversation for over an hour in Thai, I concentrated all my energy in trying to control my nose drippings. I was sweating and tearing and burning in my ears, and the only Thai I could contribute was an ironic "very delicious". We told our hosts we had to return home at eight that evening. Which, of course, meant that by eight we went over to visit Grandma next door. Which means you need to visit with Grandpa, but he was in the hospital. So off to the hospital we all went. On the way our hosts decided to buy a hamster.

Learning about and from Buddhism is a fantastic aspect of studying here. I've been reading Living Buddha Living Christ by Thich Nhat Hanh- it helps me recognize the connections between our two faiths; their 'interconectedness'. In the afternoon we have a culture class that explains different aspects of Buddhism. We all have to listen closely to the quiet voice of our lecturer- an eighty plus year old Thai man who speaks his wisdom through stories and suggestions and gentle questions. On the topic of impermanence, he sits with his hands folded, his back hunched, and his slow calm voice just close enough to the mic to hear, 'if you met my mother 90 years ago, you would not say, "hello Professor Wan'. I was not yet a thought. And if you saw my mother with an infant 86 years ago, you would not say 'Professor Wan, why are you crying so much' because I was not yet Professor Wan. And yet again, when you return to Thailand in ten years, you can visit a Temple and see my remains, but you can not say to them 'you are awful lazy these days Professor', because Professor Wan will be no more. Mr. Earth came to me a while ago and said 'you've had this body on loan from me for too long Professor'. But I pleaded with Mr. Earth saying, 'please give me just a few more years so that I can meditate and work for good'. And Mr. Earth thought and said 'for this means you can keep your body a while longer, but I will need some parts back' and so I returned to the Earth my hair and my teeth. But there isn't much of that left" He spoke so softly, so slowly, that we thought with the end of each sentence he may in fact be dead. And thus he calls from us a moment of meditation on impermanence and selflessness. This is how he teaches us about Buddhism. The time he has spent in reflection allows him the humility and peace to speak of religion and immortality with grace, calm, and a sly humor.

We had a fantastic weekend at a Forest Temple learning to meditate. They stressed mindfulness- to sit quietly and observe your breathing, your sitting, your hearing, and to bring it all to mindlessness. We all stood quietly as Monk Gabe chanted "staaaaanding, staaaanding. Know that right now you are standing. Intending to walk. Right goes thus. Left goes thus. Right goes thus. Left goes thus. Last step, right goes thus. Intending to turn. Tuuuuurning. Tuuuuurning. Tuuuuurning. Tuuuuurning. Now you are staaaaanding. Staaaaaaanding." I felt I could turn round about eight times in the amount of time I was to turn a half circle. Slowing our pace is extremely difficult. Letting go of practicality and productivity is difficult. 35 minutes of staaaaaaaanding is difficult. But it really brings you to a better place.

.

The weekend was a nice retreat. The mountain air was refreshing. A monk took Keith by the elbow and showed him their quarters and meditation paths and explained his personal commitment to the monastic life. I was busy feeding catfish. Swarms of whiskered beasts flopped over one another to consume in whatever quantity of breadcrumbs their large mouths and mediocre aim allowed. Clearly more interesting than Enlightenment or whatever Keith gleaned from the morning.

Meanwhile, Keith has been honing in on his skill to convince people to do really stupid things. He is like a predator seeking out easy prey! (In this case, students who are highly competitive, impressionable, or gullible.) One student is particularly vulnerable to his cunning, and has thus far (1) eaten nine bananas in five minutes before going to a village without plumbing (2) eaten a very large spoonful of Thai chilies-in the same village (3) ran up and down 332 steep stairs in a temple (4) hopped on his right foot up 320 stairs at another temple and (Keith's pride and joy), (5) fed a swarm of catfish a piece of bread from his mouth while hanging upside down on a bridge. This must be the same flair Keith used to woo me.

And with all that fantastic insight, we say our farewells! Keep well!

The stuff that dreams are made of

I have taken an interest in dreams. People spend eight hours a day sleeping (at least as I approach 30, that seems more reasonable), and I have to believe more comes from that time than rest and drool. I take it to be my most genuine processing time, free from pretense or deceit. By paying attention to my dreams, I awake to a part of myself too often clouded by daily drama, preoccupation, or pride.

I remember two dreams from the other night. In the first, I was plastering a cob house wall in a business suit. As explored in my last entry, I feel torn between upcoming career and life choices. Both the cob walls and fancy pants are a means to and end. I want to reform foster care and, by golly, business suits just might do the trick. I want to live intimately with friends, and as we all know, 'if you build it, they will come'. And yet, these two things seem at odds. I was getting plaster all over my outfit, and in an attempt to avoid dirtying my suit, I was doing a horrible job plastering the wall! Each precluded the other.

Dream #2: I had a bloody nose. That's about it. I looked it up on a website I'm a little embarassed to admit I frequent. This dream dictionary suggested that a bloody nose warns the dreamer of becoming overly involved in other's fights. The application of this wise counsel is astoundingly broad. I have been picking fights for my past self and my future self. I have been mediating arguments, unprompted, on behalf of my husband, my sisters, and my parents. Not to mention my recent meddling in the love-lives of others. Sometimes I am attempting to fill my long-standing role as peace keeper. Other times I am trying to explore new conflict styles. In either case, I feel 'beat up', leaving no relationship better than before.

Dabbling in Determinism

After two set years in grad school, glued to one region of the world and one main task, it is strange to come upon another fork in the road. I think about all the people I might have been. This is a very real consideration to me. As I see it, the roads I have taken have lead me to a very specific identity (or, at least, some very specific roles). A career. A last name. Maybe I would have been "Mrs. Smith, MSW" regardless. If the nature of time is fixed, as we understand it to be in the past, then I'm willing to see the future in a similar fashion. But my perception is that I have a lot of choices coming up. I could work clinically, leading to an LCSW and growing a certain set of skills. Or I could work in the macro-level, collecting and analyzing data, influencing policy, and growing a completely different set of skills. Both are within me. Another split: I could return to Thailand or Guatemala and really solidify a second language, feel that constant challenge and self reflection offered by a cross-cultural vantage, and really begin to align myself with those fighting poverty and oppression. Not to mention, I might eventually be able to eat spicy food without crying through my nose. Or, following another path, I could live with nine close friends in the mountains of West Virginia, tending to my own physical, psychological, and social health, making a positive impact on the world by having intentional relationships with the land and people, and being perfectly content to smell like butter the rest of my life (as I am told those of us from the US do). I am discouraged to consider the inability to do both. I am relieved to remember that some choices are not mine. If my husband's contract is renewed, we probably wont go to Guatemala. If I don't get a macro-level job, I'll probably work clinically, and vice versa. And I balance my (un)controllables with those of a million other people, towards a collective future yet unseen.

I know this - what I do now, in this moment, to grow mindfulness or relationship or integrity or discipline or learning or self-acceptance or joy, will follow me in whatever role I fill, and whatever future (fated or yielding) I live.